Google Analytics is a vital tool in understanding how people behave on your website, especially if you’re new to web analytics. Its comprehensive view of your traffic, how your audience has been acquired, where they go on your site and how long they spend on there makes it an easy-to-use and relatively jargon-free service.

If you’re a small business, and you don’t have very high traffic volumes, then you need to make sure that your Google Analytics reflect external activity on your site as accurately as possible. If your analytics are taking yours and/or your colleagues’ interactions into account, then they are likely to be misleading. However, it’s very straightforward to apply a filter to exclude multiple internal IP addresses from Google Analytics.

The process in which you do this ultimately depends on the number of IP addresses you wish to exclude. If your website is accessed internally from a very small number of IP addresses – this could be anywhere from two to five IPs – then you can set up a single custom filter to exclude them all, for which there are simple instructions below.

Any amount higher than that and you will probably want to create an individual filter for each IP address. This may seem more time-consuming in the short term, but it will be more beneficial in the long term. For example, if one of your internal IP addresses changes, then you’ll only have to modify the corresponding filter. If that IP address is part of a string of 20-50 addresses, then you may have to rewrite the filter altogether.

This blog also contains a quick guide to excluding a single IP address from Google Analytics. There are other regular expressions available to apply, but the following two processes are a great way to start:

Filter a Single IP Address from Google Analytics

1. Log into Google Analytics and head to the ‘Admin’ section of your account.

2. Under the ‘View’ column, click ‘Filters’ (make sure that you have selected the right reporting view if you have more than one).

3. Click ‘Add Filter’.

4. Give your filter an appropriate name (in this instance, something like ‘internal IP address’ is more than sufficient).

5. In the ‘Select filter type’ field, select ‘Exclude’.

6. In the ‘Select source or destination’ field, select ‘traffic from the IP addresses’.

7. In the ‘Select expression’ field, select ‘that are equal to’.

8. Copy and paste your public IP address in the ‘IP address’ field and click ‘Save’. Your filter will then automatically be applied to the assigned reporting view.